Apple Crushed The Competition This Christmas

Lots of people unwrapped Apple products this Christmas. Flickr/Visa Kopu
Apple has proven to be the most dominant gift choice by far for Christmas 2014. More than half of the new mobile devices activated worldwide were made by the company, accounting for 51% of the market, Flurry Analytics data shows.

It beat second-place Samsung by a long way: Apple's closest competitor comes in at 17%. Nokia, Sony, and LG meanwhile make up less than 10% combined. Most of Nokia's activations were for its Lumia model.

To put these figures into perspective: For every single Samsung product activated, its Apple counterpart saw 2.9 booted up.

"It's clear that Santa is no longer into cookies — he prefers Apples. It was a banner Christmas for Apple, the company that started the mobile revolution with the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007," Flurry writes.

Other smartphones, such as those made by Xiaomi, Huawei, and HTC, all had less than 1% share of activations on Christmas Day. However, it's likely these brands were so vastly outperformed because their popularity lies securely in Asian countries — which, of course, don't celebrate Christmas, or do so on a much smaller scale.

Flurry
To form the statistics, Flurry analysed device activations across the globe by manufacturer from Dec. 19-25. It also delved into app installations, another obvious indicator. The data also examines more than 600,000 tracked apps to identify those downloaded over the festive period. In the US exclusively, on Christmas Day app installations rose by 2.5% year-on-year.

As Business Insider noted in November, the iPhone was expected to have a blockbuster holiday quarter thanks to two new models, the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo estimated Apple would sell about 71.5 million smartphones during the season. Total numbers have yet to be released.

Apple's iPhone 6 was the most activated phone, while its big brother, the iPhone 6 Plus, came in at number 5. Although medium-sized phones remain the favoured choice by consumers, the "phablet" market is gaining momentum and more people than ever are switching to a larger smartphone. Flurry notes this could well be because there's now an iOS version. It says Christmas saw a "big jump in the number of phablets activated."

As a precursor to 2015, Flurry mentions the data suggests the iOS platform will continue to do well in western markets. Demand for larger smartphones, rather than full-sized tablets, will continue to rise.